Sri Lanka finds a way to re-use furniture waste
Faced with tonnes of waste material from furniture manufacture, Moratuwa, on Colombo's southern outskirts, has come up with a unique solution. Municipal authorities have returned the problem to source, asking furniture companies themselves to develop a product using wood waste.
Moratuwa is home to Sri Lanka's best carpenters, with 4,000 furniture shops and timber merchants. And everyday, 20 tonnes of wood waste is dumped. With no dumping ground and transporting elsewhere too expensive an option, the waste is dumped anywhere -- even thrown into the nearby ocean.
The furniture companies have welcomed the initiative and are keen to participate. "I want to set up a register of furniture manufacturers that have large amounts of waste to dispose of", says Gamini Ranasinghe, chief of Malindu, a group that has been in the business for 25 years. His offer to create chipboard out of wood waste, a process he had learnt during a training exhibition in the us, was accepted by the authorities, who also gave him an abandoned factory to produce the chipboard in. The new factory was set up on May 5, 2004, with help from a uk group of experts. Started with an investment of us $2.5 million, it employs 25 people directly and about 250 indirectly.
Special machines, imported from Germany, sort and clean different sizes of waste. After the chipboard is made and then laminated for waterproofing, it's ready to be turned into any sort of furniture. Now Ranasinghe has also employed waste collectors to go around town and pick up waste wood at Rs 5 (five us cents) a bag, about 30 kilogrammes per bag. The factory now hopes to make 400 boards (4 feet 8 feet) per day recycling 15 tonnes of waste wood.
Malindu is the first furniture-maker in Sri Lanka to manufacture chipboard using discarded wood chips, particles and wood dust. As a rule, chipboards are mostly imported from India, Indonesia and Malaysia. But with the new municipal initiative, it is likely that the local demand of 4,000 boards per day would be met locally. An added bonus to the civic problem of waste dumping that Moratuwa has managed to resolve.
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